The talk in Texas is about using its newly discovered shale gas abundance and its growing renewables capacity synergistically. But is natural gas a bridge to renewables or an environmental sin?

“Sooner or later, oil and gas fields will exhaust and the cheapness will be gone. Renewables are an investment in the future,” former San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger told renewables and natural-gas advocates at the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association 2013 conference, Renewable Energy in an All-of-the-Above World.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the impacts of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, China’s ongoing air-mageddon, and the current killer typhoon in the Philippines, the synergy is important, said keynoter Dan Reicher, a former advisor to Presidents Obama and Clinton and the Executive Director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford. “There are big opportunities in the dramatic price drops of natural gas and solar.”

The IEA predicts the world will spend $38 trillion on energy infrastructure by 2035, Reicher said. “We can do it well, or we can do it poorly, but if we do it well, we can do well by the future.”

The energy technology pipeline runs from research and development to deployment, and there over 10,000 firms in the U.S. alone that are working on it, Reicher said. The lowest-hanging fruit is energy efficiency, and companies like Hara, Silver Springs Network, and Itron continue to advance it by combining energy technology and internet technology. “Where ET meets IT,” Reicher said, “knowledge is less power.”

The ability to develop shale gas sources has turned up massive new supplies all over the country and established natural gas as energy’s bridge to the 21st century, Reicher said. “Natural gas and renewables can be very important to one another, because natural gas can firm up the variability of renewables and renewables can firm up natural gas’s price volatility. Adding energy efficiency and storage technology could produce a sustainable technology base.”

There are two places in the energy technology pipeline where capital is vital. But crucial financial supports like wind’s PTC and solar’s ITC have not been consistent, and many supports that could be consistent (such as putting a price on emissions) have not been politically viable, Reicher explained. “If you don’t have large amounts of capital, you don’t get this stuff built.”

Funding is vital to get proven technology across the “valley of death” and show it can be deployed at scale. Fracking technology, which may have serious environmental risks, "took 65 years and enormous amounts of private and federal investment" to get across the valley of death, Reicher said. Financing is also vital in the last stage of development when the technology is deployed at scale. But the cost of capital at that stage can be prohibitively high.

Senate sponsors of a bill that would open MLPs to renewables recently hosted a high-level meeting with representatives of the oil and gas and renewables industries, Reicher told GTM after his presentation. The oil and gas people, knowing how renewables and natural gas complement and offset the risks of one another, said their confidence in the MLP as an investment vehicle makes them ready to invest in renewable energy MLPs. There was also talk, Reicher said, of hybrid natural gas-renewables MLPs.

“Are natural gas and renewables friends, enemies, or frenemies?” asked National Renewable Energy Laboratory Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis Director Doug Arent. The risks of a theoretical natural gas project and a theoretical renewable project, Arent explained in answer to his own question, address one another’s “variability and points of failure and become points of complementarity and mutual support.”

In 2013, there were 480 gigawatts of renewable capacity globally, according to keynoter Dan Arvizu, the director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). “The renewable energy industries are real and happening today. The question is no longer how much can you have. The question is how much do you want.”

But despite a 2012 NREL study that showed the U.S. could get 80 percent or more of its needs from renewables in 2050 with today’s technology, Arvizu said, natural gas is the good news story in the U.S., and Europe and Asia are "salivating" at the prospect of access to abundant and affordable gas.

“The new frontiers are integration and scaling up,” Arvizu explained. “The high penetration of renewables requires system-wide flexibility and a new operating paradigm." That paradigm includes variable supply, as well as variable load, increased distributed generation, the joining of multiple balancing areas, and changing roles for utilities, consumers, investors, power producers, technology vendors, and regulators.

Environmentalists’ concerns about methane are “very scary,” Arvizu said. And the re-emergence of natural gas may cause frustration for renewables advocates. But natural gas firms the grid for renewables. And the findings of a recent MIT study strongly suggest that the U.S. must minimize the carbon emissions produced from burning natural gas by 2040 or face dire consequences.

“Much depends on reducing risk,” Arvizu said, “so that development is the result of private-sector pull instead of policy push. That is already happening in solar and wind.”

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Herman K. Trabish, D.C., was a Doctor of Chiropractic in private practice for two decades but finally realized his strategy to fix the planet one person at a time was moving too slowly. An accidental encounter with Daniel Yergin's The Prize led to a protracted study of the bloody, fiery history of oil and then to Trabish's Oil In Their Blood "trilogy" (http://www.oilintheirblood.com), a pair ...

The US EIA states that in 2012 commercial buildings and industry and the power plants consumed approx. 19 Trillion cu.ft. of natural gas. America's problem is that we waste 40% to 60% of all the natural gas consumed by commercial buildings and industry. It gets blown up chimneys across America as HOT exhaust into the atmosphere. How might this effect Global Warming?

What are the 3 elements of Climate Change that must be addressed? 1) Reduce Global Warming (2) Reduce CO2 emissions (3) Water Conservation.

Increasing natural gas energy efficiency with the technology of Condensing Flue Gas Heat Recovery is designed to recover the heat energy from the exhaust of combusted natural gas exhaust. Then this heat energy has been recovered, it can be utilized back in the building where this fuel was combusted as building space heating, or as heated domestic or process water, or even be sold to a neighbouring industrial facility.

The US DOE states that for every 1 million Btu's of heat energy recovered from these waste exhaust gases, and this recovered heat energy is utilized efficiently, 117 lbs of CO2 will NOT be put into the atmosphere.

Then there is the Water. When the heat energy is recovered from this combusted natural gas, distilled water is being created. The better the heat recovery process, the greater the volumes of water that will be produced.

Why has this not been done in the past? The technology of Condensing flue gas heat recovery has been operating in many places in North America for the past 30 plus years. Why are not more industries applying this technology? Industry want to produce more widgets, and increased energy efficiency with low natural gas prices pushes the desire out further. What about to reduce emissions? Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and our battle with Climate Change just started a few years ago. Industry needs an incentive in their pocket book before they have a desire to spend money on Increased Energy Efficiency and Reduced Global Warming Effects.

It's an effort that is so very worthwhile. They have to be shown the costs and the benefits. The benefits are of course much greater. It goes into generations.

What can be done with power plants takes a lot of time and space to layout, but power plants can have no emissions, little or no global warming effects from the exhaust, and much water to be utilized.

The NREL's study in which it claimed that 80% of the US's electricity (not total energy) could come from renewable sources strung together a number of unlikely assumptions (like cost didn't matter) in order to get the answer they wanted.

What they found was that the really big and popular renewable sources (wind and PV) would only provide about 43% of our electricity, and that included use of 120 GWatts of energy storage. The majority had to come from dispatchable energy sources like hydro, CSP, and largest of all biomass which would require a huge chunk of the country to cultivate (they assumed that the impact on available farmland, biofuel production, and wildlife areas would be acceptable). Even the 8% of electricity from nuclear power plants in the scenario was dispatched to support the variable renewables.

The bottom line is that as wind penetration rises past 20 or 30%, natural gas will become more and more difficult to replace. Wind power by itself cost slightly more than gas, and wind with storage costs much, much more. Gas-fired plants are attractive to utilities for balancing wind because of their low cost, but the gas industry as a whole requires enormous investments in pipelines and other infrastructure; all of these investments constitute momentum which helps to keep us tied to gas.

The natural gas bridge is a trap. If you think wind and PV with storage is worth paying extra for, then ask for that. Otherwise, choose an energy technology that is not so dependent on storage or fossil fuel.

Herman, the coupling of renewables with natural gas is hardly odd. Suffering from a public relations problem, the gas industry has found a backstage pass into the hearts of gullible greenies via largely-ineffectual renewables - and renewables depend on gas peaker plants to balance their meager, variable energy contribution. So their relationship isn't one of enemies, "frenemies", or even friends - it's a co-dependency built on hype, profit, and cynical disregard for the environment.

Years ago the Pickens Plan, the brazen proposal of gas magnate T. Boone Pickens to use some hastily-erected windmills as a bribe to guarantee gas a chief role in American energy, was called out early on. No matter; the slack was picked up by the fracking movement and the industry has been on a roll ever since.

Most impressive is the gas industry's "bridge" theme, which is a masterstroke of public relations. Bridges have two termini; in this case ostensibly one end is in the Land of Dirty Carbon, the other in the Land of Bountiful Renewable Energy. But the metaphor is miscast; the gas industry isn't the bridge itself, but the entity entrusted with building the bridge. That entity secures its own livelihood by building an infinite structure - a bridge with a start but no end. Of course, travelers setting out on it are promised something different altogether, but by the time they realize it's too late.